In Sussex Avenue in Newark, across the street from the New Hope Baptist Church and around the corner from the city’s water department, there is a fire hydrant that could be a symbol for what’s going in the city when it comes to revenues, resources and need.

The hydrant has been leaking for at least month of Sundays. A two-gallon bucket I stuck under one stream filled up in about a minute. And my bucket wasn’t wide enough for all the leaks.

That kind of loss can’t be good for the water pressure you might need in a fire. It’s also a lot of water wasted for a city that has been cracking down on the residents, landlords and businesses that don’t pay their water bills on time.

Earlier this month, during a visit to The Star-Ledger, Mayor Cory Booker said Newark’s water is a precious resource and finding ways to maximize revenues from water — such as setting and getting the right price from the cities Newark sells to and bringing in more customers — is an essential part of digging Newark out of its budget hole. That means every drop is precious.

That fire hydrant also illustrates how great Newark’s infrastructure needs are. That hydrant and lots of others are currently hooked up to a network of temporary pipes that run from the hydrants along the curbs in several neighborhoods. Garden hoses feeding off those pipes are providing a temporary water supply to homes and businesses as contractors repair the underground water system.

I talked to a crew from the Spinello Co., one of several contractors working on water and sewer lines around the city.

The problem is "tuberculation," which is a technical term for crud clogging up the system. Over time, deposits build up in the cast iron conduits. The crews have found pipes and valves marked "1848" and "1908," so time has taken its toll.

A guy who said he has been working on water systems for 30 years said Newark’s is the worst he’s seen, with six-inch pipes so clogged with deposits you can barely get a hoe handle through.

For some Newarkers, however, the water flow stopped not because of tuberculation, but because of unpaid water bills.

The city cut off 920 accounts that were seriously in arrears and because Newark is mostly a city of renters, tenants have suffered for their landlords’ sins.

City Business Administrator Michelle Thomas said a landlord with several buildings came in to settle a $25,000 water-sewer debt. The city’s get-tough policy has morphed into an amnesty offer that lets those who owe the city, for taxes as well as water, settle their accounts without paying penalties or interest.

As of this week, the city has collected $983,786 in amnesty payments, and 90 percent of the bills paid were for less than $1,000. The city is hoping to collect $5 million on delinquent water bills, and $20 million on old tax bills.

In the meantime, some tenants are getting the water turned back on by using rent money to cover the landlord’s water bill. Thomas said the city’s law department is figuring out how to advise tenants caught in the water crackdown.

Isn’t that the kind of thing Newark should have figured out before it instituted the crackdown?

That would have put the city in a strange position, Thomas said, since the landlord, not the tenant, is the city’s customer.

But the tenants are residents, constituents of the city. Some landlords don’t even live in Newark. I prefer public policies that get the money by punishing the right people.

I asked Thomas about another water matter. For a time, the Booker administration was pushing the idea of creating a Municipal Water Authority that was going to take over water functions, with the power to borrow by floating bonds. There was talk about borrowing enough to take care of the city’s budget problems. That raised fears among residents that high water bills would follow.

The administration pulled the proposal off the table because there was no support for it on the city council. That’s because there was so much opposition from residents. After all, the idea sounded just like one that the currently elected officials opposed so vociferously when Mayor Sharpe James, suggested privatizing Newark’s water.

Now, Thomas said, the city is finding ways to maximize water revenues and resources without a municipal utility.

Sounds like they never needed one in the first place.

So, I asked Thomas, if you collect what you should from residents and the other municipalities, and find new municipal and commercial customers, could Newark generate enough revenue to take care of all its infrastructure problems, like replacing 200 fire hydrants a year and keeping the sewers from backing as well as put itself in a really good fiscal position?

Thomas, whose desk is under a banner that says "We Are in a Budget Crisis," said the infrastructure problems run into the hundreds of millions. The revenue potential is in the mere millions.

Oh.

But then, what I thought when I looked at the fire hydrant that was leaking like a sieve is true: every drop counts.